Wednesday, 8 April 2015

The consequences of socialism … [updated]

“The Sex Pistols, we never really thought of ourselves as some dead serious load of old nonsense, it was always more to do with humanity and humour. There was no vicious undertone in us, no nasty edge. And certainly none of the deadpan, dreary political opinions like The Clash wallowed in. We lived in the real I world. We actually did come from council flats. We knew the consequences of socialism.” - John Lydon, Uncut Magazine

“Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word … Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.”- Ludwig Von Mises, from “Why Socialism Must Always Fail”

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”- Margaret Thatcher

The consequences of socialism have been evident everywhere they’ve been tried. Anyone over forty has seen them all before. Anyone over forty who has seen them all before and still denies them is lying to you.

The consequences, ultimately, if not stopped in time, are tyranny and starvation.

Venezuela did not stop in time.

This video below is in Spanish - but the pictures give you the idea (and here is a translation of the video description): Spanish journalists in Venezuela “to uncover the ‘secret’ that the president, Nicolas Maduro, and his government try to keep hidden from the world” – here, videoing a nationalised, government-owned supermarket.

The videoing has to be done secretly as men with guns forbid it. They forbid it, because there is very little in the supermarket to buy.

The first image is a parking garage. There are no cars (there is very little fuel in one of the world’s largest oil producers). Where there should be cars, instead there are seats for people to use when waiting to enter the supermarket. You must wait to enter the supermarket because as empty as the shelves are inside they are not as empty as people’s stomachs.

So they queue just for the chance to buy very little.

The consequences of socialism are evident everywhere they’ve been tried.

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